mrtg-rrd - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

mrtg-rrd - How to use RRDtool with MRTG

SYNOPSIS

After using MRTG for some time you may find some limitations, mostly in the areas of
performance and graphing flexibility. These are exactly the areas addressed by RRDtool. To
learn more about RRDtool check out its website on

http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

RRDTOOL INTEGRATION

When using mrtg with RRDtool you are replacing rateup with the RRDtool perl module
RRDs.pm. To enable RRDtool support in mrtg you have to add the line

LogFormat: rrdtool

to your mrtg config file.

MRTG needs access to both the RRDtool perl module RRDs.pm and to the rrdtool executable.

If these two items are not installed in locations where perl can find them on its own,
then you can use the following two parameters to supply the appropriate directories.

For the location of the rrdtool executable you put

PathAdd: /usr/local/rrdtool/bin/

or

PathAdd: c:\rrdtool\bin

For the location of the perl module it would be:

LibAdd: /usr/local/rrdtool/lib/perl/

or

LibAdd: c:\rrdtool\bin\lib\perl

When you have made this modification to the configuration file, several things will happen
when you run mrtg again with the new config file:

1. mrtg will take all your old ".log" files and convert them to ".rrd" format. (The
".log" files don't get touched in the process, so if things don't work out they are
still there.)

2. mrtg will use rrdtool to update its databases. These will have a new format called rrd
which is totally different than the native log format of the classic mrtg.

3. mrtg will not create any webpages of graphs anymore. It will only query the routers
for traffic information and update its rrd databases.

The advantage of whole thing is that the mrtg will become much faster. Expect the runtime
to drop to 20% of the previous value. (I would like to get some feedback on this from
folks with large installations.)

Mind you, though, while the logging process of RRDtool is very fast, you are also gaining
some time by neither creating graphs nor updating webpages. The idea behind this is that
it is more efficient to create graphs and webpages on demand by using a cgi script.

At the moment there is no official script to do this, but two contributers have created
such scripts:

One4All aka 14all.cgi
This was the first program to take over the webpage creation and graphing task. It
has been developed by Rainer Bawidamann [email protected]. You can find a copy
on Rainers website: http://my14all.sourceforge.net/ The program comes with its own
documentation

routers2.cgi
This is another CGI frontend for mrtg running with rrdtool. The main difference
between this and 14all is that the web pages it creates are much more stylish than the
ones from mrtg, plus they support User Defined summary graphs and different levels of
Authentication and Authorisation. This has been written by Steve Shipway
([email protected]). You obtain a copy, and find a forum and demonstration system
at http://www.steveshipway.org/software/ The program comes with its own installation
instructions and install script.

mrtg-rrd
The mrtg-rrd script is a CGI/FastCGI application by Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak for
displaying MRTG graphs from data in the RRDtool format. It is an intended replacement
for the 14all.cgi script. It can make your monitoring system faster because MRTG does
not have to generate all the PNG files with graphs every 5 minutes or so. Instead of
this the graphs are generated on-demand when the user wants to see them.
http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/mrtg-rrd/

FUTURE

Just as a side note: MRTG-3 will be based entirely on rrdtool technology. But don't wait
for it ... get going now!

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